TribSocial

Sharing ideas and tips in the social space -- by John and Rodney

[tribsocial]

A couple of cool posts this morning:

Viral Audio? Sure! Tips and observations:

http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/four-tips-for-creating-viral-audio-from-soundcloud/s2/a562373/

Twitter Cards — boy, a world of possibilities here, I've got some homework to do: 

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards

That's right, puppies.

[socialmediadesk]

Two lists of free tools for journalists

A station reporter emailed me yesterday and mentioned that he was always looking for free or no cost tools for his newsroom. Recently these two resources were mentioned on the NICAR listserv:

Free Tools for Digital Journalism Storytelling

Google Doc full of Free Storytelling/Journalism Tools

if there are other resources for these, please let me know.

[tribsocial]

Cool approaches to Instagram

Or, as the Hootsuite article has it,

10 Creative or Weird Uses of Instagram

... it's easy to imagine adapting just about all of these to one aspect or another at the Tribune.  I think a crowd-sourced end-of-Festival promo could be downright hip, for example. Read the story, see if it gives you any ideas ... 

[tribsocial]

Natalie gives props to Politico's Instagram. "They do a great job of mixing in quotes, pictures, screenshots from their site, videos, shots from the office or the field, cartoons, etc.," she writes. We're trying some similar things with the Trib's Instagram. Quatable cards, in particular, like the one below, have resonated well for us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. 

On another Instagram note, scheduling posts on Instragram is tough, if not impossible, because Instagram doesn't open up its API. So, unlike Facebook and Twitter, we can't schedule posts for Instagram ahead of time. 

We recently tested Schedugram, which enables you to schedule Instagram posts and even schedule them in bulk. It's a paid service, albeit a pretty modestly priced one, and after kicking the tires during the free trial, I think I'll pony up the monthly fee. 

Apparently the way Schedugram gets around Instagram's API limitations is by having real people post your pics at your scheduled times. During our trial period, I noticed a couple of bugs and misfires, but overall, it's a promising application. Definitely check it out if you're trying to manage an Instragram account and don't have the bandwidth to regularly post throughout the day. 

[tribsocial]

Allison shares this clever use of Instagram. A Russian ad agency created a web site of sorts within Instagram using deliberately placed photos and tags. Full article here. 

[tribsocial]

World Cup GIFs

When it comes to using animated GIFs with news stories, we've dipped a toe or two in the water. See here and here, for example. In addition to helping illustrate those stories, GIFs like those two are easy to drop into Twitter and Instagram to help reach new audiences and promote the stories in a purely visual way. 

While political and policy coverage doesn't always lend itself to GIFs, it can work sometimes. Soccer, on the other hand, is 100% GIF gold.

SocialBro (love the product, loathe the name) collected a great sampling of World Cup GIFs. A couple of faves are below, and check out the full list here.

Animated GIFs on Twitter eh? This seems appropriate: #esp #ned #worldcup http://t.co/eSjy5JysR7

— Jason Stanley (@JasonWStanley)

June 18, 2014

Out of this World Cup RT@NASA Friendly #WorldCup rivalry pits US vs German astronauts on space station #USA #GIF #ISS http://t.co/KBOMYjwMPV

— Ronan Hand (@ronanhand)

June 26, 2014

If you're interested in using GIFs at the Trib (for reporting or member communication or who knows what), grab Chris, Dan or Rodney. We'd be happy to help you. 

[tribsocial]

People don’t want to watch for longer than 90 seconds when a video is shared on Facebook

Mark Frankel, BBC assistant editor of social news, as shared in Sarah Marshall's notes

[tribsocial]

Auto Tweeting – now with images!

Some of our twelve Twitter accounts are crafted by humans, others are auto-generated with IFTTT, a robust, free service you should definitely check out. We handcraft all Tweets on our primary accounts – @TribTalkTX and @TexasTribune, for example. Some of our wire feeds, on the other hand, are auto-tweeted with the help of IFTTT recipes. 

Here's an example of an IFTTT recipe that Tweets every time we add a new entry to the AbbottWire:

The IFTTT system has worked very well and enabled us to support more Twitter feeds that we otherwise could with our small staff. The IFTTT system is not without its shortcomings, though. For one thing, it doesn't support our vanity URL short links – trib.it – so we miss out on a bit of branding with each tweet. Another shortcoming, and this is a bigger one, is IFTTT-generated tweets don't include images. 

Tweets with images generally outperform text-only tweets. We boost the chances that our tweets will travel further every time we include an image in the tweet. So, it's always bothered me that our auto-tweets are text only and never really jump out on a user's Twitter feed. 

I've been testing a new service called Twibble that solves the problem. It auto-tweets like IFTTT with two big differences: it grabs the lede art from the tweeted link (regardless if it's our link or another publication's) and includes it as a photo in the tweet. Twibble also supports our bit.ly shortened URLs. 

So what does that mean? Have a look at the two tweets below to see the difference:

Each tweet is promoting the same copy and the same article. The difference is the top one (generated by Twibble) inserts the lede art from the article into the tweet, and it converts the link into our vanity trib.it link. 

The second tweet (generated by IFTTT) includes no photo, and it converts the link into an ift.tt short URL, not a trib.it one. That's great for IFTTT's marketing – not so great for the Tribune's. 

If you're auto-tweeting anything, give Twibble a look. And let me know if you need help setting it up.

-- Rodney

[tribsocial]

All of Trib's Twitter Handles in One List

As the Trib has grown, so has the number of Twitter handles we manage. We were starting to get confused about which accounts we have and who's managing each one, so I created a public list on our site. Find it at texastribune.org/twitter. As we add (or kill) Twitter handles, I'll update that list. 

Adding a bit of color to the Trib's Twitter history and handles, here's a T-squared I wrote to announce the Twitter list. Here's the Trib's first tweet:

@TexasTribune isn't launching online until the fall, but the conversation can begin now. #followfriday

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) July 17, 2009

[tribsocial]

15-second Videos from the BBC

During the Rio Grande project postmortem, we talked about how some news orgs, like CNN, are cutting incredibly short versions of their video packages for mobile and social audiences. (Some as short as six seconds!) Here's an example of a how the BBC is approaching it:

And here's another example, this one about the Korean ferry tragedy:

Billed as Instafax, these are complete video segments told within Instagram's 15-second time constraint. Find a few details about the BBC experiment in this article by The Next Web.

[tribsocial]

Tweetdeck Tips

Sarah Marshall, the WSJ's social media editor, routinely shares golden tips. (Follow her here.) She recently published this advanced guide to Tweetdeck that's worth a read. 

Compiled during a Twitter training session hosted by WSJ UK, her guide turned me on to some of the more robust filtering and search options in Tweetdeck, such as monitoring for multiple retweets of Tribune stories simply based on our URL, not our Twitter handle or hashtags. 

If you're new to Tweetdeck, here is a helpful guide from Gizmodo to getting started. 

One last Tweetdeck resource comes from Twitter itself, which owns Tweetdeck. It has some great advanced tips on search and collections.